The official board game of Rainbow Six Siege is being released by Mythic Games, the company behind the official board games of Super Fantasy Brawl and Darkest Dungeon. 6: Siege, the board game adaptation was announced in February, but today a Kickstarter has launched and pre-orders are now open. The standard edition starts at $70, but a $200 purchase gives access to five expansions.

The board game aims to recreate the tactical FPS action of "Siege" in a 1vs1 board game, which will be more difficult than other board game adaptations. The base version will feature all 20 operators from the 2015 video game, and subsequent expansions will add more operators when the game launches next year. As a bonus exclusive to this campaign, you can also get the "Zero" operator (Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell) now.

I tend to like board games to be simple, but "6: Siege" looks pretty complicated compared to other tabletop games that take several hours to play; I'm still confused even after watching Geek & Sundry's thorough demonstration of the game in its entirety (if you're curious, see below embedded below), but the gist is that players pre-position their operators on a battleship-style map and take turns moving, tilting, shooting, and using gadgets against other players' operators. There is also a system of barricading doors and, I believe, shooting into the next room over the wall.

As in the video game, each operator has unique gadgets and abilities as well as some backup grenades and armor ratings. Of course, there is also a pre-discovery phase where you actually control two versions of your character, since stealth objectives are defeated if you can see other players' operators on the board.

If this was difficult for you, we are on the same page. After a few practice sessions, you'll get the hang of playing, but it's certainly not the kind of game to bring to a party. That said, I do like the fact that the game attempts to faithfully emulate elements of video games such as line of sight. If a player comes under fire and does not believe that the operator could really see them from the current angle, the player can issue a challenge and bring up the included "gaze ruler" to settle the dispute. In the video game, when I was yelled at in text chat that the enemy was around the corner and shooting at me (which he wasn't), I kind of wished I had something like that.

Not surprisingly, the Kickstarter has already surpassed its $100,000 goal and is over $400,000 as of this writing. The campaign only lasts for 10 more days, so if you're interested in this game, jump on it now. The game is expected to ship by June 2022.